The increasingly forgettable work of Malcolm Gladwell

G.D. pointed out the latest Gladwell article to me, and now that I’ve read it, I’m at a loss for words: rarely in the history of long-form journalism has the pitch been more obvious or the product more strained. Gladwell decided to write an article on violence in the National Football Leauge, went to his editor with his Vick-topical article and was told to run with it. The problem, of course, is that the entire article boils down to this question:

Is [football] dogfighting or is it stock-car racing?

And that question, I think we can agree, makes little sense for the simple reason that its analogy isn’t analogous. I know that blunt counterintuitive statements are a hallmark of literary journalism, but they need to be founded on something more substantial than this:

[I]s the kind of [tau deposit-induced dementia] being uncovered by McKee and Omalu [in former NFL players] incidental to the game of football or inherent in it? Part of what makes dogfighting so repulsive is the understanding that violence and injury cannot be removed from the sport. It’s a feature of the sport that dogs almost always get hurt. Something like stock-car racing, by contrast, is dangerous, but not unavoidably so.

The relevant analogy is right there—preventable injuries in Nascar versus the NFL—but had Gladwell went with that, he would have to ditch the dogfighting angle.* The problem, then, is that the once venerable New Yorker would rather be clever and topical than deeply informative. Consider, for example, the career of the go-to literary journalist for me and Ari [thanks ben and Rick, my shame will only endure until Homer stops nodding], John McPhee. His first book was about A Sense of Where You Are, was about the professional basketball player, long-tenured Senator and former Presidential candidate Bill Bradley, but was written before Bradley graduated from Princeton. McPhee did a superlative job outlining what would make Bradley successful, but he didn’t write about him because the New Yorker wanted an article about the Senatorial or Presidential candidate.

Similarly, after Katrina the magazine saw fit to print McPhee’s brilliant (and to my students, hilariously unpronounceable) essay “Atchafalaya,” which was first published in in 1987, long before most people outside of Louisiana cared about the state of the levees. My point, as you probably guessed, is that the odds of the New Yorker dipping into their archives and pulling out a Gladwell essay on the strength of its reporting or the depth of its intelligence decrease with every superficially clever, patently topical article they allow him to write and consent to publish. This isn’t to say that Gladwell is incapable of strong reportage or intellectual depth—only that that people can’t seem to convince him to slow down and write something with heft enough to be as relevant twenty years down the line as it is this week.

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39 comments

I grant that the article boils down to a simple question, asked in not-the-most-interesting way. But. What’s your problem with the analogy that you’re willing to say not, “That’s debatable” but “Gladwell = idiot”? The thing he doesn’t really go into, it seems to me, is whether the fans of the game expect it to be more dog-fighting than stock-car racing. You could argue about racing in this sense, even, that perhaps fans of racing events anticipate and delight in bad accidents. (Destroyed in Seconds, etc.) But there’s some evidence that the sport goes out of its way to minimize the risk of such for the most part. Hockey, on the other hand, has historically taken a certain active interest in encouraging or countenancing fighting. NFL seems to me to be kind of interestingly on the cusp as far as this goes–the color commentary celebrates the hard hit, the toughness and physicality and even brutality of the game but doesn’t root for someone to clothesline an opponent or concuss him. So maybe the article doesn’t play the analogy well, but isn’t the question valid, in a way?

I don’t get the hostility to Gladwell lately . . . I really enjoyed Outliers but since it’s come out there’s been lots of commentary about his analysis being facile. I mean, if you want to talk about things that have stood the test of time, he pretty much coined the term “tipping point” (or at least made it vastly more popular).

I didn’t quite say he was an idiot—I strongly suggested the opposite, in fact, in my last graph. My problem is less with Gladwell than with the editors who allow him to write as quickly as he does and encourage that work to be topical. That’s not what that rag’s there for, is more to my point.

That said:

So maybe the article doesn’t play the analogy well, but isn’t the question valid, in a way?

Were the focus on the lust for violence in the audience, I could buy that; but clearly, Gladwell wanted to equate the treatment of football players to that of dogs pit against each other in the ring, which is suggestive, but not the least bit fleshed out. There’s an unexplored irony to the treatment of Vick’s dogs and that of the former players the NFL and NFLPA have doled out $5 million in medical coverage to, but Gladwell doesn’t go there; nor does he compare the attitude of the NASCAR drivers to that of Turley, which would’ve established another valid analogy. The article reads, then, like a well-researched, well-written draft of something whose ultimate significance still alludes its author. Which is fine as a stage, but it’s not quite fit for publication yet.

I don’t get the hostility to Gladwell lately[.]

It’s not hostility on my part so much as disappointment—he’s capable of better, but not encouraged to be so. Were he working under, say, William Shawn, I think he’d be producing far superior work.

I think there’s a problem with the analogy, but I thought the article itself was very, very good, if only because I don’t think many people were aware of the cumulative risk to football players due the ordinary impacts that don’t result in concussions or obvious immediate trauma.

What dana said. Also, consider that the pleasure of a heavy contact sport like football lies at least in the simulation of combat. (For the spectator; also, as this piece makes clear, for the participant.) If, as recent research has been showing (and this article is not the first place I’ve read about it) the players are paying a genuine high physical price, that obviously makes it more like a blood sport. To this extent, as Tim says, the analogy is valid.

Also, the old NYer, of whatever your favorite period, published plenty of fluff along with the Herseys and Carsons and Barthelmes and McPhees. It may be novel that it now publishes a sort of “serious fluff” that spins clever evanescent bubbles out of nonfiction journalism; but let’s not displace what we’re regretting — the issue is not that Gladwell is not McPhee, but that the new NYer doesn’t have a new McPhee at all.

The B-29 thing is interesting. But I’ve always been convinced by the arguments about the value of conducting accident reports under blanket immunity because finding out what happened and preventing it is more important than punishing the guilty party, and the two goals are frequently in strong opposition.

And, FWIW, I’ve been roundly chastised for referring to Atchafalaya in online discussions, on the grounds that it vastly underplays the importance of petroleum industry canals out to the gulf.

if only because I don’t think many people were aware of the cumulative risk to football players due the ordinary impacts that don’t result in concussions or obvious immediate trauma.

That’s old hat, though, for people familiar with the sport. Even the studies he cites have been ongoing since the mid-90s. Not a criticism, per se, just pointing out that it’s never been his reporting or research that’s outstanding so much as his ability to synthesize vast swaths of other people’s expertise. (That’s not an insult either. My favorite book on earth is McPhee’s Annals of the Former World, in which he’s actually driving around the country synthesizing the vast swaths of expertise of the people he’s with.)

It may be novel that it now publishes a sort of “serious fluff” that spins clever evanescent bubbles out of nonfiction journalism; but let’s not displace what we’re regretting — the issue is not that Gladwell is not McPhee, but that the new NYer doesn’t have a new McPhee at all.

Exactly. Except, you know, for McPhee, who’s still chugging along. But there’s no heir apparent—or, put another way, they seem to think Gladwell’s his heir apparent, and that just ain’t the case.

But I’ve always been convinced by the arguments about the value of conducting accident reports under blanket immunity because finding out what happened and preventing it is more important than punishing the guilty party, and the two goals are frequently in strong opposition.

It’s the abusive extension of that principle, though, that Barry’s after. He’s criticizing those who claim states secret privilege based on accident report-logic, even though there’s nothing accidental about the information they’re protecting.

I’ve been roundly chastised for referring to Atchafalaya in online discussions, on the grounds that it vastly underplays the importance of petroleum industry canals out to the gulf.

I’d be interested to hear more about that, Jake. My father and brother both work for ExxonMobile in the LA/TX region, and they both found the article compelling despite their ideological blinkers.

Let me count the ways . . . actually, they’re too many to count. Imagine a bunch of kids who’ve never been outside of California trying to pronounce that, from the Chico Marxish “atcha fail-a ya” to the hilariously phonetic “hatch a fail eye ai.” Seriously, I think in four years maybe one or two of them got it right.

I haven’t noticed much of an increase of criticism of Gladwell since at least Blink. But it’s possible I read mostly the critical reviews of that book. Meanwhile, if it’s as good as I remember it, I could see the New Yorker re-running the piece he did on race.

I’ve read only limited amounts of each, but I don’t see enough similarity between Gladwell and McPhee for the comparison you’re making, Scott. Both write about science-y/social science-y topics, but McPhee strikes me as a narrative reportage writer and Gladwell as a popular science writer*. That is, for McPhee it’s important to get down to close details and textured context; for Gladwell it’s important to take an idea or set of ideas, give enough context to make them interesting narratively, but ultimately to abstract or generalize them out of that context and try to show how they’re applicable in different areas of life. So McPhee’s actual experience producing a story influences that story in a direct way; Gladwell’s generally does not. Maybe that’s why the race piece I’m thinking about stands out for me: it’s based closely on his own experience.

But as I said, I haven’t read much of either so I could be completely wrong.

*”Popular science writer” can have a negative connotation, but that’s not how I’m using it. I just mean science writing for a general, rather than for an academic/professional/researcher audience.

I should note that I haven’t read any of Gladwell’s books. I have read some of his New Yorker pieces, although I can’t recall any specific examples, which suggests that he may have always been pretty forgettable.

I’d be interested to hear more about that, Jake. My father and brother both work for ExxonMobile in the LA/TX region, and they both found the article compelling despite their ideological blinkers.

Search on Unfogged. I’m assuming we’re talking about the one that’s in Control of Nature.

It’s the abusive extension of that principle, though, that Barry’s after. He’s criticizing those who claim states secret privilege based on accident report-logic, even though there’s nothing accidental about the information they’re protecting.

Presumably they feel that courts would not agree regarding accident-reporting logic? I certainly don’t get the sense that the lawyers in the piece would have been convinced.

I still haven’t gotten over how wrong his full-court press article was. He made an analogy between military tactics and basketball and showed his ignorance of both in the process. I don’t think you can throw George Washington, the VC, Iraq and three or four different levels of basketball into a blender and say “look, it’s all the same!”

I don’t have a lot of respect for the guy’s ideas. They’re far too reductive and provocative-for-provocation’s-sake.

Much of the criticism of Gladwell is justified, but … in fact, there is a reasonable argument that the risk of injury is inherent to football, and presents an intractable problem to the NFL.

Let’s focus on quarterbacks. The quarterback is subject to constant violent attack, under circumstances in which injury is a serious risk. The QB is also the most important, most visible, and highest payed player on most teams. Better equipment has reduced injuries, but the danger remains. Every time the NFL changes the rules to protect QBs from injury, they really do change the way the game is played — the objections are in fact justified, however we calculate the trade-off.

To further complicate matters, the NFL salary cap, a key to the competitive balance that is sacred to the league (to the extent that better teams are assigned tougher schedules) virtually precludes a team from carrying two good QBs (when the Patriots’ untried backup turned out to be good, they had to let him go).

It is an inherent weakness of the game that offensive backs, generally its stars, are subject to season-ending and career-ending injuries.

My impression of him has long been that people doing actual science in fields related to what he writes about are probably annoyed.

Another difference between him and McPhee—the latter’s subjects argue with, or better, through him at the other experts he consults, but there’s never the sense that they don’t respect him. (At least, it’d be odd if, as in Annals, they continued to correspond and road-trip with him for three decades if they lost respect for him.)

I feel so close to you now.

Me too, Walt.

McPhee’s “Atchafalaya” piece is in need of some editing itself.

I take that back.

(Also, I should’ve included this link to some of my favorite bits from Annals in the original post.)

there is a reasonable argument that the risk of injury is inherent to football, and presents an intractable problem to the NFL.

What’s intractable about it? Inherently dangerous sports are as old as sports. Byzantine chariot racing had as many fatal crashes as NASCAR, possibly more, and it’s hard to see how any sport could be more dangerous than gladiatorial combat. Do you really think the dangerousness of football is a threat to its popularity?

Chris, I’m not sure if you’re trolling, but you can’t just invoke history and call it done. Blood sports in the Colosseum are generally presented and understood as the representing the worst in human nature: pleasure in the death and injury of others; precisely what we want out public entertainments to avoid approaching. No one said that dangerousness is a threat to football’s popularity, they asked why we don’t seem to care.

So, to the Gladwell piece, while the prose isn’t great for me — I found myself losing interest halfway through — I don’t think the metaphor/parallel with dog fighting is just a topical tack on, I think it goes to the heart of the moral question Gladwell is asking. If we recoil in horror from the cruelty of dog fighting once it is made known, why don’t we seem to care about the effects of football or boxing on those that we pay to play it professionally? Setting aside the possibility that we care more about animals than about professional athletes, is it because the delay between the initial injuries and the sentence of dementia make our culpability feel more remote or is it that we’re really actually OK with the arrangement whereby free will and monetary rewards make it acceptable for athletes to destroy themselves for our amusement?

This is often cited but not actually true; each NFL division has four teams in it, and each season each NFL team will play 4 games against teams which finished 4th in their division, 4 games against teams which finished 3rd, 4 games against teams which finished 2nd, and 4 against teams which finished first. The year-to-year differences in schedule difficulty have more to do with the strength and weakness of divisions overall and are out of the NFL’s explicit control.

The narrative structure of “Atchafalaya” doesn’t work. It roughly follows the course of the river, but the only part that was interesting (to me) is the first half about holding back the Mississippi. The parts about catching crawfish and Morgan City are dull, and a good editor would have made McPhee lose them, even at the cost of abandoning the conceit of travelling down the river.

JPool: I don’t think the metaphor/parallel with dog fighting is just a topical tack on, I think it goes to the heart of the moral question Gladwell is asking.

Precisely. The NASCAR angle is abandoned very quickly. It’s the analogy with dog-fighting that’s central. And the analogy is made through the concept of “game”. Fans’ attitude towards football players is equated to fans’ attitude towards fighting dogs: implicitly the players and dogs are equated.

Blood sports in the Colosseum are generally presented and understood as the representing the worst in human nature: pleasure in the death and injury of others; precisely what we want out public entertainments to avoid approaching.

ISTM that you are using a definition of “we want” that differs significantly from actual popularity. We (meaning contemporary Americans) seem to actually rather like risky and even violent sports (although not combat to the death). IOW, we *do* want our public entertainments to approach the injury of others, we just don’t want to admit it or have the permanent injury rate get *too* high. (Different people have different thresholds for how high is too high, which is why boxing is a niche sport compared to football or NASCAR.)

I wonder if there’s a similar phenomenon at work in the treatment of war as a spectator sport and the idolization of soldiers. War is serious business, but a lot of us aren’t watching to make sure our public servants get it right, we’re watching to cheer for our team.

The actual answer to the moral question is probably that like most gladiators (but unlike boxers, NASCAR drivers, or football players), the dogs in dogfighting are owned by someone else and do not voluntarily choose to participate in their sport. Although people who could put up with the existence of slavery could put up with slave-gladiators, too, today we wouldn’t be comfortable with either. Football players know the risks (or at least we assume they do) and choose to accept them, just like skydivers or smokers or speeders. So there’s no moral problem, or so we can tell ourselves.

ISTM that most people would agree that if there are previously-unknown risks to football, football players should be told, but that if enough of them choose to keep playing anyway, there’s no moral issue in continuing to watch. There’s just no way to apply this principle to dogfighting — the risks are already known; communication is basically impossible; but there’s no way it could affect the dog’s decision anyway because the dog isn’t making a decision in the ordinary sense of that phrase.

better teams are assigned tougher schedulesThis is often cited but not actually true

Well, it is true that the NFL tries to do what they can with the schedules, but it’s equally true that they can’t do much. As evidence, the Steelers last year faced what was reported as the hardest schedule of any team in over 30 years, even though they had been only an above-average team the previous year (and the Patriots had, famously, gone through the regular season undefeated).

Chris makes a good point about consent, but I think he – as are others here – is underplaying the central fact of Gladwell’s article, which is that brain damage in football has nothing to do with crunching hits or long careers. Indeed, brain damage isn’t the traditional locus of “football injuries” in popular imagination – fingers and knees are. And hey, who among us wouldn’t put up with achy knees and misaligned fingers in exchange for gridiron glory?

But, in fact, the evidence suggests that even low level college players are looking at good odds of the equivalent of Alzheimer’s dementia by age 40 – I don’t think that’s the deal that players think they’re signing on to, nor what fans think they’re witnessing.

Chris thinks the essential facts revolve around consent, but look at different animal sports – almost everyone opposes dogfighting, a good chunk of people have problems with horseracing, and only a tiny fringe objects to dog shows. Yet none of those feature consent by the participants. The range of public reaction to them reflects the understood effects of the activities on the animals. When something happens to change that understanding – see Barbaro and than horse that was euthanized on the track a couple springs back – then the sport’s place on the range shifts.

I suspect that the key locus of change is in whether a sport is safe enough for our kids. Boxing used to be ubiquitous, even played at by the middle class. Then, for a long time, it was mostly for poor kids, but it was pretty respectable. Now, after we all watched Ali turn into a pathetic shell, only the most desperate families allow their kids to fight at young ages. It may be that football will also cross this line, and Pop Warner will fade from the middle class as it becomes too dangerous for “our” kids. I wonder what the future of the NFL is in an America where the middle class refuses to let their kids play the game (except in deracinated touch and flag formats).

ISTM that you are using a definition of “we want” that differs significantly from actual popularity.

No, what I’m saying is that while some people may embrace athletic spectacles out of desire to see other people harmed, these first people are generally regarded (I don’t have polling data, but I would contend by a majority of Americans) as immoral and/or sociopathic. Some sports that are more violent or injury prone, such as mixed matial arts or rugby, have become more popular in recent years, while other violent sports, such as boxing, have become less prominent. Still other sports that are less violent, such as tennis or golf, remain popular despite the derth of exciting injuries. Similuated violence is pretty big, but, you know, all simulated like. So I’m not sure what can be meaningfully concluded about our collective desires from all this.

The question therefor remains not what “we want”, but what we, as a society, are willing to accept. We are currently willing to tolerate the calculated risk of injury in various sports, but if we begin to understand permanent disability not as an accident that happens but as a predictable consequence of the way a game is played, I would like to think that that would change our feelings about what should be allowed to go on in such public work places. If we learned, say, that tennis players were pretty much guaranteed to lose the use of their arms ten years after playing, it would certainly change the way I felt while watching it and people could push to have the sport banned or changed so as to help prevent such injuries.

For example, is the first vowel like “at” or like “ah”? (Me, I say AT-cha-fa-LIE-a, with reduced vowels on the unstressed syllables, and I’m not going to go look it up.)

That’s close enough for government work. My friends who are actual, honest-to-G-d l’Acadiane pronounce “AT-cha” as a single syllable more along the lines of “‘tacha,” but they also eat gator, invite me over to dinner and politely ask me why my people thought the world would be a better place if we murdered Jesus, so there you go.

I didn’t claim to be anything other than disappointed in Gladwell for not living up to the potential I see in him . . . which is, to my mind, a perfectly reasonable thing for someone who spent four (five? six?) years teaching literary journalism to say about a promising literary journalist whose editor refuses to hold his feet to the fire. I’m not comparing myself to Wittgenstein here, I’m just saying that I think had Gladwell a more ambitious editor, he’d be better served.

I suppose that means I’m saying I’d be a better editor, but you know what? I couldn’t handle the non-relating-with-writers duties. But! I think I’d be able to say, as I have many times in the past, “This has promise, just think it through a little more.”

Put differently: the fact that we’re debating what exactly Gladwell’s analogy is speaks to its failure as a gripping, self-evident analogy.

gladwell’s thesis is as follows:
among the many kinds of sport, there are some in which the injury or death of the participants is only incidental to the conduct of the sport (as for instance automotive racing), and some in which the injury or death of the participants is essential to the conduct of the sport (as for instance dog-fighting). there may be other kinds of sport as well, but there are at least these two kinds, with at least these members in each.

so far, analogy has played no role; we simply have the positing of two categories, with examples of each.

gladwell then continues by noting that we have previously thought of football as a sport of the first kind, but (he argues) there is increasing evidence that it is a sport of the second kind.

this is not a matter of analogy; it is a matter of classification. and i did not find it difficult to discern gladwell’s purposes, in the least. so the claim that his analogy is not self-evident seems to me to fail in both directions: it’s not an analogy, and it is self-evident, or at least perfectly open and non-obscure.

i readily concede that we can argue with his thesis in many ways. in particular, i would argue that we should recognize at least a third category or kind of sport in which injury is not essential to the sport, but it is inevitable by any means we have or are likely to have, so long as the laws of nature remain as they are. and it seems to me that football is a sport of this third kind.

we could certainly imagine an altered universe in which football was played with exactly the rules it currently has, and watched with exactly the same relish by its spectators, and yet no one ever suffered any mischief. (i believe the same is not true for dog-fighting, i.e. that any alteration that left the dogs unimpaired would change the very nature of the game, and remove the spectators’ incentive to watch).

given, however, that linemen are not disembodied angels, and that running-backs must find many obstacles of membrane, joint, or limb (exclusive bars), the conduct of this game in this world will lead to injuries.

all this much we might have divined from common sense. what new research tells us further is that the injuries are especially common and especially horrifying. prior to this research, it might have been imagined that the inevitable injuries would be rare, slight, and not degrading to the injured’s rational dignity. new findings strongly suggest that the injuries will be common, grave, and utterly destructive of the victim’s very self.

if true, this should change our attitude to the sport. this is what gladwell argues.

i think he is mistaken to suppose that the new research shows that football is an *essentially* traumatizing sport (as dog-fighting is). no; what we learn is that it is an *inevitably* traumatizing sport. the necessity is not of the analytic sort, but rather mediated by natural laws (that’s why we needed research to discover it, rather than armchairs, whereas no accelerometers are needed to discover the barbarity of dog-fighting).

if i am right, and we should put football into a third class of non-essentially-but-inevitably traumatizing sports, then gladwell was wrong about how to categorize it.

but being wrong about categorization is a different thing from being unclear about an analogy.